Rick wrote:
--- Bryan Derksen bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
Take a look at the original proposal itself, posted 3/4/2005 10:12 AM:
"Any VFD nomination not listing a reason in Wikipedia:Deletion policy may be summarily removed from the page."
Exactly. And "not notable" is not one of those criteria. And yet it's one of the most commonly used reasons for listing an article.
RickK
I absolutely agree with Dpbsmith. Policy is meant to change with the community, not vice-versa. As much as some of us would like to avoid voting using highly subjective grounds like notability (which has different meanings from person to person; my idea of notability seems highly inclusionistic compared to some of the notability grounds used in voting today), the fact remains that a good deal of the community *does* use notability as a reason for deletion. If the community wants an article to go, we shouldn't disregard their opinion just because it's based on something subjective, since the resolution of the issue of contention -- should the article be deleted? -- has been agreed upon. (taken with a slight modification from [[Wikipedia talk:Deletion policy]])
I don't think removing nominations from VfD that are without a reason found in the deletion policy is a good idea. If the nomination has no specific rationale in itself, that might be acceptable, but non-notable is often used as shorthand for not encyclopedic. It's basically an editorial judgement - it's like a shorter version of "I don't think this topic is sufficiently encyclopedic enough to merit its own article in this encyclopedia". A nomination to delete should not be discarded wantonly. If it's unreasonable, the community will speak for itself, and that's much better than letting someone unilaterally make the decision that the nomination is bullshit.
I agree something has to be done about VfD's size, though. I just don't feel this is the right solution; rather, it more feels like a disguised attempt to lead us down the slippery slope of discarding votes simply because they just said "Delete. Non-notable." Regardless of the reason given, as I stated in the first paragraph, it's still an editorial decision that does not need extensive justification: An editor feels the topic does not merit an article. That opinion is factored into the decision by the community as a whole.
I think what should be done is to get the community more involved in VfD by reducing its size and providing more avenues for categorisation of articles being nominated for deletion. A professional aviator, for example, would be interested in VfD nominations relating to aviation but not scuba-diving. And so on. Likewise, a lot of articles are often deleted unanimously or nearly unanimously, and end up cluttering VfD, making it difficult for editors get to the heavily debated nominations. [[Wikipedia:Categorized deletion]] and [[Wikipedia:Preliminary deletion]] are both proposals that should be considered and discussed more; if people aren't satisfied with them, nothing's stopping them from making suggestions.
VfD's problem is not people making unreasonable nominations (those are already easily removed because we still have a smattering of editors being bold enough to use common sense). VfD's problem is it's too large for the community to easily vote. Solve that, and the problem of trigger-happy nominations will be easier to handle.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])